Legends of Tomorrow Name-Drops a DC Superhero In a Surprising Way

Last night, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim has revealed a rather cool behind-the-scenes production detail for the show…and it has to do with a DC Comics superhero.

Earlier this weekend, Guggenheim tweeted out the image above (you can see the image embedded in the tweet below), seemingly indicating that the production company set up for Legends of Tomorrow is apparently Waverider Films, named for the time-traveling, gold-skinned superhero created by Dan Jurgens and Archie Goodwin for 1991’s Armageddon 2001 event.

Waverider in the comics is a member of the Linear Men, a group that also includes Matthew Ryder (an alternate-universe version of himself without powers), Liri Lee and an aged Rip Hunter, whose body has been ravaged by time travel and who has some cybernetic replacement parts. For a time in DC Comics, the Linear Men were the closest thing there was to a functioning group of Time Masters.

Rip Hunter, played by Arthur Darvill, will be the one to gather the team on Legends of Tomorrow. In the comics, he’s a member of the Time Masters as well as the Linear Men, but at different times in his life. In the promotional sizzle reel for Legends of Tomorrow, he introduces himself as a member of the Time Masters.

One DC Comics miniseries said to be an inspiration for Legends of Tomorrow — Time Masters: Vanishing Point — included a subplot about a supervillain attempting to gain power by stealing Waverider’s dead body and draining it of its chronal energy. In order to do this, he takes advantage of a break between Hunter and the other Linear Men, manipulating Liri Lee and Matthew Ryder into helping him briefly.

During an interview at Comic-Con, Legends of Tomorrow producer Phil Klemmer told ComicBook.com that Rip Hunter and the other Time Masters won’t always see eye to eye.

Rip’s father, Booster Gold, will not appear in the first season of Legends of Tomorrow, presumably because he has his own movie in development. One way around that, if the writers were so inclined? At the end of DC’s recent Convergence event, the pre-Flashpoint version of Booster Gold threw himself into a chronal energy store at the heart of Vanishing Point, the Time Masters’ headquarters, and was transformed into the post-Flashpoint version of Waverider.